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WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

A CENTENARY ADDRESS 



STEPHEN S. WISE 



BETH ISRAEL PULPIT 

Volume 11. JANUARY, 1906 No. 1 



- PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY CONGREGATION BETH ISRAEL 
PORTLAND, OREGON 

Yearly, $1.00 Single Copy, 10c 



Vol. II. 



January. 1900 



No. I 



Published Monthly, except July and August, by Congregation Beth Israel, 
Portland, Oregon. 

Yearly, $i.oo; Single Copy, lo Cents. 

Subscriptions to be sent to Hon. Joseph Simon, Chairman of Publication 
Committee, Mohawk Building, Portland, Oregon. 



3rXhn^ lEhentng AJilnriffiaw for tl|^ Montl^ cf 3lan«arg 



January 5—" The Coming Social Economy," Rev. G. C. Cressey, D.D. 
January 12 — " Another Word on the Freedom of the Pulpit." 
January 19—" Is the Moral Supremacy of the Churches Endangered?" 
January 26 — "The Service of the Preacher to his Age." 

TEMPLE SERVICE 



Friday Evening, 8:00 o'clock. 
Saturday Morning, 10:30 o'clock. 



ur'Qd 



CO 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

A CENTENARY ADDRESS 

BY STEPHEN S. WISE 

The Oregon country has within the past days brought to 
a close a centenary celebration of national character and ex- 
tent, commemorative of a splendid pioneering feat, the achieve- 
ment of Lewis and Clark, who one hundred years ago under 
the inspiration of Thomas Jefferson fared forth into the 
wilderness, and, beating their way through the trackless wastes, 
added to the territory of the nation an area imperial in value 
and almost continental in scope. It does the American people 
little honor that while the Louisiana purchase of Jefferson 
and the Lewis and Clark journey of exploration and conquest 
have found ample commemoration, the citizenship of the land 
knows not or little cares that December tenth, 1905, is the 
centenary of the birth of one of the noblest of Americans, one 
of the hardiest pioneers of the spirit, one of the greatest 
benefactors of a race, and therefore of the race, — William Lloyd 
Garrison. 

Like Lewis and Clark, Garrison was a pioneer, an explorer, 
a hero, a benefactor. While the exploration of Lewis and 
Clark lasted two years. Garrison's was the quest of a lifetime, 
a longer than thirty years' warfare with the terrible forces 
of slavery. The undertaking of Garrison was fraught with 
greater peril, for while Lewis and Clark set forth to face the 
dangers of forest and plain, after having equipped themselves 
with every weapon which foresight and means could command. 



♦Delivered at the People's Church, Cooper Union, New York, Sunday evening, 
November 26, 1905. 



2 WII.LIAM I.LOYD GARRISON 

Garrison unarmed faced a world of foes, scorning to arm 
himself save with the weapons of the spirit — Truth, Justice, 
Righteousness, Love. Greater than that of Lewis and Clark 
was Garrison's benefaction, for they gave us territory, and 
he wrought mightier results who resurrected a race from 
the death of slavery to the life of liberty. Ours has been an 
age of emancipation. Earth has not known a nobler band of 
emancipators than they whose labors have enriched and blessed 
the last century. What a company of immortals ! Kossuth 
and Mazzini, liberators of nations; Darwin and Huxley, lib- 
erators of the intellect; Parker, Emerson, Channing, Brooks, 
liberators of religion ; Tolstoi, Ruskin, Carlyle, Morris, Marx, 
liberators of the social body; Wilberforce, Clarkson, Garrison, 
Lincoln, liberators of a race ! Garrison and his peers alone 
toiled and suffered that others might be free, an alien and 
despised race, while the national, intellectual, social, religious 
liberators labored to free themselves and others. Garrison 
liberated others because he himself was free. 

A prophet of our own day, Tolstoi, fathoming, as it 
were, the secret of Garrison's great work, rightly admeasures 
the grandeur of the man in emphasizing Garrison's life-long 
resolution to occupy the highest possible ground. Throughout 
his life Garrison occupied the highest possible ground. Occu- 
pying the highest possible ground, immediatism, as we shall 
see, became his aim, and non-resistance his method. Immediat- 
ism, not gradualism, was the expression of his uncompromising 
conscience, immediate and unconditional emancipation his de- 
mand. Occupying the highest possible ground, "best possible," 
"expediency," "compromise," "opportunism," were not in his 
vocabulary, who flamed forth in the winged, Luther-like words, 
{J>1 am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I 
will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard." His 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 6 

demand that the black slave go free was heard because he was 
in earnest, because he would not equivocate, excuse, retreat. 
No compromise or half-way measures for him who was for 
laying the axe to the root, who feared "to perpetuate by prun- 
ing an overgrown system of oppression," who rightly under- 
stood that "gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice," 
"the question of expediency has nothing to do with that of 
right," "expediency and policy are convertible terms, full of 
dishonesty and oppression." The high expediency of immedi- 
atism was the only expediency to which he would give himself, 
hence amelioration, mitigation, alleviation were not for him 
whom immediate and unconditional liberation alone could 
satisfy. 

His abhorrence for compromise, his scorn of expediency, his 
passion for immediatism led him to the point at which it be- 
came possible for him, as early as 1831, to counsel the seeming 
treason of dissolution in the words, "If the bodies and souls of 
millions of rational beings must be sacrificed as the price of the 
Union, better, far better, that a separation should take place." 
In view of the prospect of the annexation of Texas in 1841, 
he had said, "Sooner let the Union be dashed to pieces than 
that the Northern States should submit to this infamy." "The 
American Union is such only in form, but not in substance, a 
hollow mockery instead of a glorious reality. The time is rap- 
idly approaching when the American Union will be dissolved 
in form as it is now in fact." In reiteration of what Webster 
termed "those words of delusion and folly," "Liberty first, and 
Union afterwards," Garrison said, "nothing can prevent the 
dissolution of the American Union but the abolition of slav- 
ery." Beginning in 1842, he attached first importance to the 
duty of making the repeal of the Union between the North and 
the South a grand rallying-point until it be accomplished or 



4 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

slavery cease to pollute our soil. As early as 1844, Garrison 
took the revolutionary position, that the watchword in the 
ranks of the abolitionist should be ''No Union with slave- 
holders." This was prophecy. The Union with slaveholders 
ceased to be, and became a Union of free men. The Union 
must be dissolved, — he proclaimed in 1854. Either abolition 
or dissolution was his demand, and abolition was the outcome, 
disunion for a time, followed by what gives promise of being 

/ reunion for all time. 

) Highest of courage was his who dared to be stigmatized 

as a traitor, who was willing to say and do such things as 
would call forth the terms, "traitor," ''treason," from the 
unthinking and the passionate. Truest of patriots was he who 
so loved his deeply sinning country that he loathed her shame, 
"attached to his country by the dearest ties, but loathing her 
follies and abhorring her crimes." So loved he his country 
that he would rather that his country perish than forever remain 
unjust. Radical and revolutionary as these words sounded 
when first spoken, he believed in a higher law than the consti- 
tution, the law of right, and something above the Union, the 
will of God. He abhorred the superstition of the many that 
the Union bore or bears a charmed life. The words of O'Con- 
nell, "Let God care for Ireland ; I will never shut my mouth 
on the slavery question to save her," echoed Garrison's atti- 
tude to the Union. Like Lessing, he would not lie for truth's 
sake: He would not covenant with wrong for the sake of the 
Union. 

Occupying the highest possible ground. Garrison set out 
to effect a moral agitation, and not a forcible revolution. The 
American Anti-Slavery Society platform, which he drafted, 
made clear "This Society will never, in any way, countenance 
the oppressed in vindicating their rights by resorting to physical 



WIIylvIAM LLOYD GARRISON O 

force." Tolstoi finds that he alone of all the great American 
anti-slavery leaders took the highest possible ground in oppos- 
ing "the right of coercion on the part of certain people in 
regard to certain others", denying it to be possible "to eradi- 
cate or diminish evil by brute force, i. e., also by evil." "Gar- 
rison understood . . . the only irrefutable argument 
against slavery is the denial of the right of any man over the 
liberty of another under any condition whatsoever. Under no 
pretext has any man the right to dominate, i. e., to use coercion 
over his fellows." It is the verdict of Tolstoi that Garrison will 
forever remain one of the greatest reformers and promoters of 
true human progress. 

The supreme trial of his faith in non-resistance came in the 
form of the attack made upon him by the Boston mob. On the 
eveof the mob, which he foresaw, he said, "To the obedient, death 
is no calamity. If we perish, our loss will but hasten the destruc- 
tion of slavery more certainly. My mind is full of peace." 
When urged to defend himself, he replied "I will perish sooner 
than raise my hand against any man, even in self-defense, and 
let none of my friends resort to violence for my protection. If 
my life be taken, the cause of emancipation will not suffer." 
And, again, according to another witness, he calmly said, "It is 
needless to make such extra effort of violence. I shall go down 
to the mob unresistingly." "Throughout the whole of this 
trying scene I felt perfectly calm, nay, very happy." With 
the problem of non-resistance in all its moral bearings and 
implications, I cannot hope to deal tonight. Suffice it to say 
that Garrison's unswerving allegiance to the method of non- 
resistance gives an air of serenity and God-likeness to the 
most heroic figure of an heroic epoch. 

Garrison was a truth-speaker. As Veridix Magnus he 
ought to be known. Truth-telling, plain dealing with men 



6 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

and measures, was the passion of his days, who spoke not to 
give offense nor for victory, but for truth's sake. "I mean 
to be only as severe as truth and justice require." "Personal 
or political offense we shall studiously try to avoid — truth 
never." "I shall use great plainness of speech, — believing that 
truth can never conduce to mischief and is best discovered by 
plain words." 

There are those who ever seek to persuade us in the face 
of wrong and injustice that agitation tends to prolong and 
perpetuate rather than to exterminate the evil, that the battle 
with the forces of wrong must ever be fought with caution 
and prudence and circumspectness, and that one must be ever 
careful to distinguish between evil and the wrong-doer, between 
falsehood and the liar, between corruption and thieves. He 
heard these counsels of overnice and superfine discrimination, 
and went his way unmoved, wisely foreknowing that if unmo- 
lested by agitation, slavery would flourish forever. He agitated 
all the time and in every season, from the early twenties until 
the first of January, 1865, and the agitated defenders of wrong 
alone deprecated his agitation as unwise and harmful. Cassius 
M. Clay, noting the lament that the abolitionists had set back 
the cause of emancipation by agitation, said in 1853, "Nothing 
is more false, because the cause of emancipation advances only 
with agitation; let that cease, and despotism is complete." 

As for waging the war of extermination equably and calmly, 
Garrison came to hate the words, caution, prudence, judicious- 
ness, and the one thing he dreaded more than another was 
that he might "dilute or modify his language against slavery." 
"To give offence I am loath, but more to hide or to modify 
Truth." As if fearing that he might be tempted to moderation 
and temperateness in a cause calculated to rouse men to a 
frenzy of passion at wrongdoing, inhumanity, cruelty, he de- 



WII.I.IAM LLOYD GARRISON 7 

Glared in the words of Fox, ^On this subject, I do not wish 
to think, or speak, or write, with moderation." And when 
he was taxed with severity and vehemence of speech, he 
repHed "Many have censured me for my severitv— but, thank 
God! none have stigmatized me with lukewarmness.'' "In 
correcting pubHc vices and aggravated crimes, deHcacv is not 
to be consulted." "Slavery is a monster and must be treated 
as such." Many friends of the slave, who, as an abstraction 
favored the liberation of the slave, and yet were unwilling to 
rouse the nation to blot out its shame, felt as did Channing 
with respect to the abolitionists, "Their writings have been 
blemished by a spirit of intolerance, sweeping censure and 
rash injurious judgment." He, not they, freed the slaves. 
Nothing less than the compulsion of an inexorable conscience 
could have moved Garrison, who was both just and loving, to 
apply severe epithets to individuals rather than to bodies' of 
men and principles. If, as was once said, Garrison's language, 
like Martin Luther's, was rough and sometimes violent, it is 
also true that nothing less than the trumpet tones, the clarion 
call, of a Garrison could have stirred the torpid, moribund 
conscience of a sinfully acquiescent nation. He would not 
as he himself said, separate the subject from personalities,' 
shoot at nothing and hit it. He refused, Channing like, to 
view the slaveholder as an abstraction, for, as he said in 
scathing rebuke, "Channing is safe from the thumbscrew the 
cart-whip and the branding-iron. ... To the slave, the 
slaveholder is very much a reality, a dreadful reality." Are we 
to deal with political corruption, with civic tyranny, with the 
shamefully unscrupulous and conscienceless methods of hjoh 
finance, of recent disclosure, with the silence of non-agitatio^n, 
or shall we agitate, and, agitating, smite and overthrow? 
William Lloyd Garrison was a man of supreme courage. 



8 WILIvIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

At the age of twenty-one, he wrote 

"Nor wealth shall awe my soul, 
Nor might, nor power." 

"I cannot know fear. I feel that it is impossible for danger to 
awe me." He never did know fear, and danger never awed 
him, who was storm-proof, who was possessed of pine and 
faggot virtue, the unstooping firmness of whose upright soul 
peril could not shake, not even the peril of the Boston mob, 
which found him cheerful and confident, and left his poise 
and serenity unbroken. His was not merely the courage which 
peril, imprisonment, privation, persecution, vainly seek to 
break or bend, but that almost higher heroism which steels a 
man to misunderstanding, slander, ridicule, defamation, often 
harder to endure than actual danger to life or limb. Branded 
as an agitator, incendiary, deluded fanatic, moral pestilence, 
calumniator, enemy of his country, he replied with the forti- 
tude of the stoic and the equanimity of the saint, "I solicit no 
man's praise, I fear no man's censure." Threats of assassina- 
tion could not affright him, nor could he be dismayed by the 
cries of slander which oftimes came from those who had been, 
or would fain have been, his friends. The threat of foe could 
not deter him ; the dispraise of friend could not move him, who 
feared only to do wrong, to countenance injustice. 

"Fear God — then disregard all other fears ; 
Be in his truth erect, majestic, free ; 
Abhor oppression, cling to liberty." 

Almost might one say that he feared not God nor man, — nor 
the devil. God he loved, not feared. Man he loved and served 
and liberated. The devil, if he could not sweetly persuade, he 
would defy and overcome. 



WII.I.IAM LLOYD GARRISON 9 

"I am for Revolution, were I utterly alone. T am there 
because I must be there. I must cleave to the right." It is 
true that he was all but utterly alone. None the less true were 
his words of a later day, ''The man who stands alone in a 
moral cause, though all the world be against him, if God be 
for him, stands in a majority and is conqueror." For decades 
he stood almost alone, as if to prove how true it is that an 
individual pitted against a vast public opinion, one man against 
the many, is divine. Two mighty forces should have stood and 
battled by his side, but they failed him, the Press and Church, 
as, alas! they still often fail the great needs and causes of 
humanity. To read how church after church, pulpit after pul- 
pit, arrayed itself against the cause of abolition, is unutterably 
saddening to one who would have the Church greatly serve 
the State. Noble exceptions there were, and not a few, such 
as Parker and Beecher and May, but the ignobly craven atti- 
tude of the churches is typed by the church minister of Boston, 
who, in 1828, after an address by Benjamin Lundy, declared 
that slavery was too delicate a matter to be meddled with by 
the people of the Northern States, again, by twenty of the 
rioters at Farmington who were men of cloth, and, lastly, 
by the founder of an American church, who proclaimed the 
divine right of slavery and deprecated the impiety of interfer- 
ence with it! Alas and alas! that Garrison might speak with 
truth of the deep, unbroken, tomb-like silence of the Church. 
Then, as now, some of the American journals served the cause 
of right with zeal and power, but in the main the press was 
satisfied to follow and to reflect public opinion which, rightlv 
directed, might have abolished the curse of slavery without 
resorting to crudest war. The strongest forces arra\ ed against 
him were those of wealth and respectability. Even the Boston 
mob was made up largely of the so-called wealthy and respec- 



10 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

table, the moral worth, influence, and standing of Boston. It 
is not too much to say to-day, forty years after the close of 
the civil war, that abolition would have come to pass much 
sooner but for the self-seeking and fearfulness of Northern 
tradesmen. It was men of property and standing, who defended 
slavery and most bitterly opposed the abolitionists. Commerce 
is ever timid. Northern cupidity and cowardice stood behind 
Southern slavery as truly before '61 as New England com- 
merce and New York capital to-day profit by grinding into 
dividends the bones of little children in the mills and factories 
of the South. If only men of affairs throughout the land 
could be brought to realize that commerce must yield when 
the interests of right and commerce clash, that the man who 
lessens dividends for a time becomes oftimes the richest asset 
of the nation. 

Alone he fought for the alone, and yet not alone, for two 
noble women fought by his side, his mother, the sacredest 
memory of his life, and his wife. These helped to make Gar- 
rison the man he was. While he was a mere youth his mother 
wrote to him of a colored woman who had served her in illness, 
"although a slave to man, yet a free-born soul, by the grace of 
God." Never once, wrote Garrison of his wife, did she ever 
counsel a less personal exposure or a more moderate course of 
action on my part. Ten days after the Boston mob, the wife of 
Garrison wrote to a friend, "Inexpressibly dear as he is to me, 
I had rather see him sacrifice his life in this blessed cause than 
swerve from a single right principle." Alone he stood save 
for these, and a small number of electest souls who stood with 
him, the women as nobly and unweariedly as the men, — Mrs. 
Chapman, while the Boston mob raged without, saying, "If 
this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here 
as anywhere." Honor and immortality to the memory of the 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 11 

heroic fellow-liberators of Garrison, few in number yet an 
imperial company. 

Garrison the dreamer was also the doer. His head was in 
the clouds of hope and promise ; his feet he planted upon the 
solid earth of realization and achievement. The native ideal- 
ism of his soul was almost matched by his purposeful, resource- 
ful efficiency. First to have sounded the tocsin of abolition 
were enough to give him deathless glory ; for more than a 
generation, he was first and greatest among those who labored 
that the race of slaves go free. Blow after blow he struck, 
each more terrible than the one before. He proclaimed the 
doctrine of immediate emancipation, he organized anti-slavery 
societies, local, state and national, he did much to develop 
a right public opinion in England by his several journeys, his 
addresses, and personal contact with English leaders of thought, 
he founded and conducted the Liberator, he led nearly every 
reformatory movement of his time. Garrison was the liber- 
ator of the enslaved, and when emancipation was become a 
fact, no one quicker or more zealous than Garrison to help 
the millions of freedmen in need of all that men, long impov- 
erished and degraded, can need. 

''Liberty and humanity" might have been his watchword. 
'T have loved liberty for myself, for all who are dear to me, 
for all who dwell on the American soil, for all mankind. Lib- 
erty for each, for all, and forever." In truth could he say of 
himself, "In short, I did what I could for the redemption of the 
human race." Humanity-mongers he and his fellow-abolition- 
ists were reproachfully styled in the course of the resolutions 
passed by the Rynders mob. Liberty and humanity ! Liberty 
for all humanity and the higher humanity through liberty ! The 
motto he had chosen at the commencement of his moral war- 
fare, "Our country is the world, our countrymen are all man- 



12 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

kind," he supplemented with yet another slogan, "Universal 
Emancipation." Of all things else, William Lloyd Garrison 
was the liberator, emancipator, breaker of chains, looser of 
the bonds of men, restorer of liberty. His was a genius of 
universal emancipation^ for no truer, greater liberator of men 
has walked upon earth. 

"A nobler strife the world ne'er saw 
The enslaved to disenthrall." 

Wendell Phillips said in 1865 that he had never met the anti- 
slavery man or woman, who had struck any effectual blow/ 
at the slave-system in this country, whose action was not born 
out of the heart and conscience of William Lloyd Garrison. 
The givers of the national testimonial said of him in words 
as honoring to themselves as to him, "He was the conspicuous, 
the acknowledged, the prophetic leader of the movement in 
behalf of the American slave — now consummated by the edict 
of universal emancipation." The vanguard of the anti-slavery 
hosts acclaimed Garrison as the leader and inspirer of the 
movement against American slavery, which has resulted in one 
of the greatest moral triumphs the world has ever witnessed. 
No more impressive testimony to the far-reaching and, in truth, 
immeasurable influence of Garrison for human rights and 
human liberties was ever borne than by the address of the 
North Shields workingmen in 18G7, "The eager joy with which 
the enemies of liberty in Europe, and their allies among the 
aristocracy of Britain, hailed that infamous attempt to solve 
all questions affecting capital and labor by making the laborer 
capital, aroused our countrymen from that political apathy 
which is fatal to a free state, and so encouraged the advocates 
of popular liberty in this country again to raise the standard 
of reform." The Duke of Argyle, at a breakfast tendered Gar- 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 13 

rison in 18GT, declared, "The cause of negro emancipation in 
America has been the greatest cause, which, in ancient or in 
modern times, has been pleaded at the bar of the moral judg- 
ment of mankind." The address presented to him upon this 
occasion rightly set forth that his labor for the redemption 
of the negro slave had achieved a higher object than the 
redemption of any similar race, the vindication of the universal 
principles of humanity and justice. Garrison was the liber- 
ator above all else, and above all other men. Liberator, — high- 
est of offices, noblest of crowns ! 

He could not have become the liberator had he not liber- 
ated his own soul. Not alone was he the greatest of liberators ; 
no man had ever so liberated his soul and enfranchised his 
spirit as Garrison, who could say of himself, as he did, that he 
was bound by no denominational trammels, that he was no 
political partisan, that he took upon his lips no human creed, 
that he was guided by no human authority, and that he could 
not consent to wear the livery of any fallible body. He ab- 
horred bonds and fetters, gyves and chains, whether physical 
or intellectual, moral or racial, political or religious. In his 
twenty-fourth year, he founded the "Journal of the Times" at 
Bennington, Vermont, which, he announced, should be "inde- 
pendent, trammeled by no interest, biased by no sect, awed by 
no power." No man ever liberated himself more entirely from 
every prejudice, and partisanship, and prepossession, save for 
truth and justice and righteousness. Liberator and self-liber- 
ated was he in the highest, in the vocabulary of whose soul, 
foreigner, alien, inferior, were not, who had so freed himself 
that to him man was man. 

Citizen of the world was this most American of Americans, 
who was withal a fellow-citizen of the world of men. "My 
country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind," was the 



14 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

expression of his soul; it was no more truly ''cosmopolitan 
vagueness and extravagance," as styled it Professor Von Hoist, 
than is the Declaration of Independence, which the self-elect in 
our land are pleased to regard as a series of glittering and 
meaningless generalities. Cosmopolite, universalist, was he, 
who drew his own portrait in the apostrophe to a fellow liber- 
ator. 

''Friend of Mankind! .... 

Thy country is the world — thou knowest no other — 
And every man, in every clime, thy brother," 

who aroused the international, the interracial, the world-con- 
science in the words, "Enslave but a single human being and 
the liberty of the world is put in peril," to whom the chained 
and kneeling negro seemed to plead in the words, "Am I not 
a man and a brother?" 

What earnest, unbreaking resolution — to the end! He 
harped not on one string, but on one string at a time, this 
"monomaniac on every subject." In dead earnest, the hardship 
and self-sacrifice, which were his, were as nothing to him, who 
made good his word, to sustain the Liberator as long as he 
could live on bread and water. Unwearied toil and unstinted 
sacrifice were the bread of life to this man with an ideal, this 
man with never a thought of self. In all his character nothing 
is more admirable than his undeviating consistency. He was 
a Christian, hence a non-resistant. A resistant Christian is 
not a Christian. Hence, too, he abhorred insincerity and hypoc- 
risy. He had no words to express his horror when the self- 
evident truths of the Declaration of Independence were declared 
to be mere rhetorical flourishes. Hence, too, he was terror- 
stricken in the presence of sabbath formalism, and held that 
every day was a sabbath and that every man might be his own 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 15 

minister. The assailants of insincerity, the unmaskers of hypoc- 
risy, are too few in any age. 

Nearly seventy years ago, in January 1837, at a meeting held 
in a Boston stable, because, as Garrison said, not a single meet- 
ing-house could be obtained on any terms, in which abolitionists 
might plead the cause of the trampled slave, Ellis Gray Loring 
said prophetically, "The individual who started this mighty 
movement is rejected and scorned by the great and little vulgar 
of our day. No matter. Posterity will do justice to the name 
of William Lloyd Garrison." Are not we, who are almost 
contemporaneous with Garrison, beginning to anticipate the ver- 
dict of the ages, which is fame? In the thirties, the city of 
New York, the headquarters of the American Anti-Slavery 
Society, had not a place for Garrison to lay his head except 
the cotton-loft in the third or fourth story of a Wall street 
storehouse, the hospitality of which was offered by a negro. In 
1833, Clinton Hall was closed to an anti-slavery meeting, which 
was compelled to adjourn to Chatham Street Chapel by a Tam- 
many Hall mob. Seventeen years later, another Tammany 
Hall mob, led by a typical Tammany Hall leader, Isaiah 
Rynders, interrupted and finally broke up an anti-slavery meet- 
ing, in the Broadway Tabernacle. How well Tammany sus- 
tains its character for zeal in ill-doing, its inspiration being 
ever the pious hope breathed by Bluecher as he looked upon 
London, ''Was fuer Plunder," with the difference that Tam- 
many's works have been uniformly consistent with Bluecher's 
faith ! In 1862, Garrison speaking from this platform on "The 
Abolitionists and their Relations to the War," showed very 
clearly that a battler for human rights is ever a statesman of the 
highest order. "Emancipation is to destroy nothing but evil ; it 
is to establish good; it is to transform human beings from 
things to men ; it is to make freedom, and education, and inven- 



16 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

tion, and enterprise, and prosperity, and peace, and a true 
union, possible and sure." 

To-night, the first of a series of centenary meetings in honor 
of Garrison is held within a stone's throw of the Broadway 
church whence fifty years ago he was driven by a mob, and a 
fortnight from to-night, on the tenth day of December, the 
white race and the black, the South and the North, will unite 
in paying homage, inadequate though it were ungrudging, and 
ungrudging it will not be, to the memory of him who is beyond 
and above the reach of men's homage and men's praise. The 
recollection and emulation of his supreme example we owe our- 
selves rather than him, who is one of the greatest of Americans, 
one of the mightiest figures of the nineteenth century, of high 
rank among the men of all times, one of those characters, who, 
as said Savonarola of St. Antoine, are the true glories of the 
human race. What St. Beuve said of Bossuet ought to be true 
of us touching our attitude to Garrison, — He is to us not a 
memory but a religion. Do my words savor of hero-worship? 
I am not afraid of hero-worship. I am afraid of the mistaken 
kind of hero-worship, the worship of the unheroic heroes, of the 
heroes not worth while. Infinite worthship in him who could 
truly say, 'T have flattered no man, feared no man, bribed no 
man. Having sought that honor which comes from God, I am 
not left without honor among my countrymen." 

Fitting it is, indeed, that the earliest of the Garrison cen- 
tenary addresses be spoken in this hall, which will forever be 
luminous with the radiance of the twin-stars in the heavens of 
liberation, Lincoln and Garrison. This is holy ground, for 
upon it they have stood. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation 
of January, ISO 3, was the echo of the salutatory of the Liber- 
ator, of January first, 1831, and of the Declaration of Senti- 
ments of 1833, by him drafted at the founding of the American 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 17 

Anti-Slavery Society. Behind Lincoln as he framed and signed 
the Proclamation stood Garrison. It was Lincoln's war- 
measure ; it was the hope and faith and aim of Garrison's life- 
time of toil and daring. Upon the election of Lincoln, Wendell 
Phillips said, "For the first time in our history, the slave has 
chosen a President of the United States. Lincoln is in place, 
Garrison in power." Ex-Governor Chamberlain of South Caro- 
lina related in 1883 that when on April the sixth, 1865, he spoke 
to Lincoln of the country's gratitude for the great deliverance 
of the slave, Lincoln answered, "I have been only an instru- 
ment. The logic and the moral power of Garrison and the 
anti-slavery people . . . have done all." 

Garrison's battle is not won. The war he waged is barely 
begun. The battle for freedom is eternal. Alas ! that not even 
Garrison's struggle for the ftiegro is ended. I am not thinking 
of the mouthings and the ravings of a Dixon, but of the thought 
soberly put forth by a Southern gentleman, Thomas Nelson 
Page, in his book on "The Negro : The Southerner's Problem," 
"Slavery, whatever its demerits, was not in its time the unmiti- 
gated evil it is fancied to have been. Its time has passed. 
No power could compel the South to have it back. But to the 
negro it was salvation." We hear again of colonization in 
Liberia, of the negro not being a man but an animal. The 
negro is disfranchised in the South, and the fifteenth amend- 
ment to the constitution of the United States is disavowed in 
theory and repudiated in practice. Oh for the voice of a Gar- 
rison to smite these traitors to the spirit of '76, these undoers 
of the blood-bought victories of '61 to '65 ! 

The truest, and visually the most searching, test of any man 
is that he be true to his ideals, that he live by his faith. In 
1851, George Thompson, the English Garrison, showed how 
Garrison had more than fulfilled the prophecy of every word of 



18 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

his immortal utterance, "I am in earnest ... I will be 
heard," and predicted that these would become household words 
over the vast continent of America, through coming years and 
ages. Garrison defined the duty of the abolitionists, "to be as 
inexorable as justice, as contumacious as truth, as unbending as 
the pillars of the universe; to put on the whole armor of God, 
and, having done all, to stand." He had the intellect to com- 
prehend and the character to fulfill this duty, and, because he 
stood erect upon the highest possible ground, he will forever 
be remembered as one, who, in his own words, "compromised 
not with the wrong, who spoke the truth, and applied it boldly 
to the conscience of the people." 

Let us strive to make our own lives worthy of the memory 
of William Lloyd Garrison, liberator of a race, uncompromis- 
ing foe to wrong, unterrifiable defender of the right, champion 
of the world's oppressed and down-trodden, prophet of peace, 
gospeller of love, apostle of the glorious liberty of the sons 
of God, our fellowman and our fellow-American — what poten- 
tial nobleness of peerage! — William Lloyd Garrison. 

"Praised and beloved that none 

Of all thy great things done 
Flies higher than thy most equal spirit's flight; 

Praised, that nor doubt nor hope could bend 
Earth's loftiest head, found upright to the end." 



303 



4 



^ 



IBrtly Sfarapl Notf a 



Addresses are given from time to time to the pupils of the 
Religious School, Sunday morning, at 11:30 o'clock. Parents are 
especially invited to be present, 

January 14, 1906. — "The Juvenile Court, Judge A. L. Frazer. 



The class for the study of the Jewish Sects, under the aus- 
pices of the Council of Jewish Women, meets on the third (and 
fifth) Wednesday afternoon of the month, Selling-Hirsch Hall, 
2:30 o'clock, under the direction of Dr. Wise. 

January 17. — 'The Essenes," Mrs. Sig. Sichel. 

January 31. — "The Pharisees," Mrs. M. Hirsch. 



The combined Confirmation and Post-Graduate Classes meet 
with Dr. Wise, Saturday morning at 9:30, the subject of this year's 
study being "The Origin and Content of Religion." 



The Study Circle of the Altar Guild meets on the last Sunday 
of the month at 10:30; this year's subject of study is "Five Centuries 
of Jewish History, 1400-1900." 



A special meeting of the Congregation was held January 15, 
1906, at which the Board of Trustees were empowered to make 
arrangements looking to the election of a successor to Dr. Wise. 







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